A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
(1) Field of the Invention
The invention relates to sharable web-based databases. More specifically, the invention relates to creation and use of spatially-related user-created databases sharable over the web.
(2) Background
For some time, large companies with extensive resources have been able to create and maintain web-based databases which can then be accessed by users over the Internet. These databases have traditionally been quite expensive and have involved significant overhead to maintain.
More recently, some inroads have been made to permit individual users to create web sharable databases for certain information, such as address books. For example, Planetall, located on the web at planetall.com permits a user to maintain a private address book on the web. Planetall then provides a service of updating the address book based on changes in member information and plans to soon provide updates based on U.S. postal change of address filings. Its general purpose is to permit networking opportunities to its membership. Unfortunately, databases such as these are severely limited in the type and format of data that can be entered, as well as how the data may be manipulated and displayed. Moreover, no provision is provided for spatially relating the uploaded data. In other words, it is difficult to spatially relate the information that is stored in entries in these databases.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to be able to provide a flexible web base database at low cost and the possibility of geographical interrelation amongst that database entries.
A method and system for providing a flexible, web-sharable database with proximity searching capability is disclosed. In one embodiment, such a system includes a database manager, a spatial indexer, and a storage unit. The database manager receives unformatted data from an interconnected network (e.g., the World Wide Web) and process the unformatted data into a series of records for the database. The spatial indexer recognizes address information in the data and generate spatial indices for records based on the addressing information to associate a geographic location with each of the records. The storage unit stores the data with the spatial indices in a form accessible over the interconnected network that permits spatial searching.